How Ideas are Turned into the Engines of Change
The Quiet Before explores a key ingredient for successful movements: a quiet incubation period far away from social media.
Many people want to create change, but it takes far more than organized social media campaigns to create lasting change. Many social movements fail because they are great at generating support. However, fewer movements include leadership that can do the hard work of “move[ing] from emotion into ideology.”
Gal Beckerman’s book The Quiet Before explores social movements before and after the internet. The internet’s invention made it easier than ever for passionate organizers to win support.
But the internet has also made it easier to avoid the hard part of social movements: generating support on the ground with real people and the messy realities of politics.
Beckerman’s book is a fascinating journey through the history of successful and unsuccessful organizing. The different ways that ideas are shaped into useful products for broader societies are different from the social media campaigns readers may recognize.
The Role of Writing in Social Movements
Before the internet, small groups of people with grand ideas rallied like-minded people together through writing. Beckerman begins by describing an astronomer’s letter-writing campaign in 1635. It lasted two decades and was one man’s project.
Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc was an astronomer who sent letters across Europe asking amateur astronomers for measurements. Astronomical charts were useless for ships because longitude was measured incorrectly. The charts were based on Catholic doctrine instead of fine measurements. Sailers knew to adjust their course as needed, but a correct map of the world and its oceans was much needed.
Beckman noted that this type of collaboration over letters was quietly revolutionary:
“For hundreds of years, letters were an advanced technolgoy. They were the first instance of thought traveling distance, disassociated bodily from thinker. But from Cicero unitl the early modern period, they moved from one place to another so slowly and so erratically that they often read more like alternating speeched than the volley of a conversation. This changed in Peiresc’s time once the post became fast and relatively reliable. The possibliyt of regular correspondence now allowed for collaboration, for theories to be shared and disputed.”
The letters were valuable because they allowed thinkers to privately trade ideas and create knowledge. Using objective measurements to fix maps was only the beginning.
The Early Internet and Small Groups
It took a few centuries, but the world moved on from letter writing to the internet to communicate ideas. One of the first internet chatrooms was called the WELL. The WELL was a group of chatrooms where people interested in certain topics could self-select into groups to discuss different topics.
The WELL may sound like an early version of social media, but it had a key role that many modern platforms have abandoned: the host:
“For every conference, there was one person, remunerated with a free subscription, who oversaw the fvarious strands of conversation. As Howard Rheingold…put it, hosts on the WELL had the same role as party hosts in real life: “to welcome newcomers, introduce people to one another, clean up after the guests, provoke discussion, and break up fights if necessary.””
The host was someone who was knowledgeable about the chatroom’s subject and who could control incentives. Beckman described the best chatroom participants:
“…they [the chatroom participants] were also conversationalists — demonstrably interested in what others had to say, acknowledging their contributions, and prodding the talk along. You got attention not by saying something that would silence all chatter and turn others in your direction but by contribuitn gin an amusing or thoughtful or useful way to the flow.”
The host and the community could reward thoughtful commentary and discourage trolling. That model worked well when the chatrooms were small. But as social platforms grew, the middle layer of hosts disappeared. Instead, each user became their own host, which left them at the mercy of their feeds and their chosen platform’s algorithms.
Social Media Sacrificed the Useful Methods of Online Communication
Social media platforms connect millions of people, but curating a feed for each person is different from overseeing a productive conversation. Expert corners are lost on social media. Instead, universal appeals to emotion or comebacks spread across social media feeds.
It makes social media a great tool for organizing around an outrage. But without private spaces to hone ideas and define strategy, online movements have no way to mobilize whatever support they have. It’s common for online movements to experience intense periods of support followed by a dramatic dropoff in influence when internet outrage moves on.
The Quiet Before’s exploration of successful and unsuccessful movements teaches one crucial lesson. Groups that are better organized tend to create the kind of lasting change that many people dream about making.
Those better-organized groups aren’t necessarily the most ethical, either. It’s a sober reflection on the ugly realities of organized power and the inadequacy of moral force alone to create the change one supports.